It's a Carbon Copy!

Today in class we talked about plagiarism and IPR (Intellectual Property Rights).
Every time somebody invents a new tool, makes a discovery or produces an artistic work, such as a book or a picture, he can protect his production through laws. These laws are called IPR; they are legal property rights and the common types are:

• trademarks,
• copyrights,
• patents,
• trade secrets.

Obviously, if you don’t respect the IPR, you act illegally; therefore, you can be sued by the rights’ owner. One of the most common illegal act is that of copying someone else’s production (e.g. words, music or invention) and pretending that you thought it or created it; this act is called plagiarism.

Plagiarism and any other illegal act linked to the improper use of something covered by IPR are particularly increased with the wide-spreading of Internet. Since Internet allows almost all computer worldwide to connect, publish and exchange information, it’s easy to meet with the above mentioned problems.

We all know how huge is the net and how difficult is to find all the needed information on the reliability and the right to use that information (see my post on images and reliability)…So, let’s all be careful about these issues!

Bye
Giorgia